Metro News & Reviews

Another comment on VA Hospital stop

Here’s another good comment that came in over the transom about our latest poll on the Westside Subway Extension. It’s from Carter Rubin, who also does some writing for our friends at LA Streetsblog.

I just wanted to chime in quickly from my iPhone. If you do the ‘walk score’ for the VA hospital (I used Wadsworth place in my search) you get a 69 rating and most of the businesses it points to are in Westwood which would involve walking on the most forbidding stretch of Wilshire in LA across Sepulveda and under the 405. Barrington and Bundy both get relatively respectable scores of 83.

According to straightouttasuburbia, a score of 69 points would be the lowest of any along the current purple line by almost 20 points.

Walk score doesn’t tell you everything, especially the number of office jobs or housing units in an area. But if anything, accounting for those things would make an even stronger case for going all in for a stop at least a few blocks west of the VA.

You made a good point about the local politics of 30/10 and the amount of money already going to projects that terminate on the westside. But that shouldn’t matter for a federal cost effectiveness calculation, and besides, [Rep. Henry] Waxman owes us some pork on this, right?

On a completely unrelated note, I’m always impressed when someone chimes in from their iPhone because my first generation model often can’t get a signal here in the uncivilized wilds of Los Angeles courtesy of AT&T’s Edge network.